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“Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” — Edward Said

Whether pushed by political turmoil, war, conflict or repression, or driven by economic compulsions, an exilic position invariably poses a multitude of challenges. The migrant — or the exile — negotiates a strange territory, substitutes the settled routine with new rhythms and rituals, confronts different realities, values and perspectives. And all the while the ‘homeland’ holds a deep affinity, almost a primordial attraction. Although with the passage of time the exile comes to terms with the new space, the new life, perhaps a pining and a ‘crippling sorrow of estrangement’, as articulated by Said, remains buried deep within the heart.

In her debut novel The Last Days of Café Leila, Persian-American author Donia Bijan tells an engaging story encompassing three generations of a family, woven around their life’s trials and tribulations in shifting spaces, times and cultures. The curtain opens in Tehran 2014, on Behzod — or Zod — an aging father who is waiting for the letter from his daughter Noor, now a woman of 40, residing in the United States since her teens, that will bring him the longed-for news of her homecoming.

There is something get­ting on my nerves day by day: it’s hypocrisy in our society and our life. Above all, in familial relation­ships. It makes me sick and I dread the day when it would rob me completely of my trust and pride and good feelings I have for the ‘family’.

The ‘family’ of the East has been so glorified and its accounts so studded with adjectives like ‘love’, ‘warmth’, ‘cohesiveness’, ‘stability’, etc., that it’s almost a sacrilege to point out any flaws, glar­ing or subtle. You can only talk about ‘the good’ and dare not contemplate ‘the bad and the ugly’.

And the last thing you can question is the parent-child rela­tionship.

If you believe in fate, you would ascribe unhappiness that abounds in people’s life to fate and no­thing else. ‘They are fated to be unhappy, to be miser­able’, you tell yourself. But if you are not such an abso­lute fatalist, you’d start wondering if it’s human beings themselves who br­ing unhappiness unto their lives.

When I think about them — Azhar Bhai, approach­ing 40, married two years back and now father of a son, Saira Aapa, his sister, a divorcee, in her early 40s and their ailing, widowed mother — I ask myself “Why have they always been such unhappy people?